Katherine Dunn (Novelist/Journalist)

Katherine Dunn is a best-selling novelist, journalist, voice artist, radio personality, book reviewer, and poet from Portland, Oregon.

Dunn was born in Garden City, Kansas on October 24, 1945. She went to high school in Tigard, Oregon, and later attended Reed College in Portland.

Following her time at Reed, Ms. Dunn spent several years in Europe traveling. While in Ireland, she had a child, and five years later she returned with her son to the United States.

In the 1970s Dunn hosted a radio show on Portland's community radio station KBOO, in which she would read short stories. Her work experience ranges from tending bar, painting houses, and waiting tables, to teaching advanced classes in creative writing at Oregon's Lewis & Clark College and voice-over work.

Dunn's novel Geek Love was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1989. She also wrote the novels Attic (1970) and Truck (1971). In 1989, Dunn announced that she was working on a fourth novel, entitled The Cut Man.

She was reportedly still living in Portland and working on the book in 1999. In 2008, it was reported that publisher Alfred A. Knopf had scheduled The Cut Man for release in September, but the novel was not published at that time. An excerpt appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of The Paris Review under the title Rhonda Discovers Art.

Dunn also wrote the text for Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective's Scrapbook (1995), a book of homicide photography; the humorous The Slice: Information with an Attitude (1989) (also published as Why Do Men Have Nipples? And Other Low-Life Answers to Real-Life Questions (1990), which contains her collected newspaper columns from Willamette Week, a Portland weekly newspaper; 3 Day Fox: A Tattoo, a poem; and numerous articles for Playboy, Vogue, and the L.A. Times.

Dunn, who has been described as "one of the better boxing writers in the United States," is an editor and contributor for the online boxing magazine cyberboxingzone.com. Dunn wrote a regular column on boxing for PDXS in the 1990s, in which she at one time provided detailed criticism of Evander Holyfield's sportsmanship in his controversial fight with Mike Tyson.

She won the Dorothea Lange—Paul Taylor Award in 2004 for her work on School of Hard Knocks: The Struggle for Survival in America’s Toughest Boxing Gyms. Her essays on boxing were collected in the 2009 anthology One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing.